


She is a Brittle Crazy Glass

by herbaceous_boarder



Series: Breeding Lilacs Out of the Dead Land (Stirring Dull Roots with Spring Rain) [2]
Category: Orphan Black (TV)
Genre: Delphine's meeting with leekie, F/F, F/M, basically me avoiding dialogue, lots of interior exploration of this gap from Delphine's pov, right before she sleeps with cosima
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-08-27
Updated: 2016-08-27
Packaged: 2018-08-11 09:09:55
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,112
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/7885123
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/herbaceous_boarder/pseuds/herbaceous_boarder
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>"I need you to dig deeper and faster".<br/>This was stupid. She was fixating on nothing. So she felt an attraction to Cosima. She felt attraction to many people, it did not have to mean anything significant. The fleeting thought arose that her total disorientation from a mere kiss and the sense she had of the terrain shifting underneath her feet probably belied this lie she was telling herself, but she chose to trust it anyway.</p>
            </blockquote>





	She is a Brittle Crazy Glass

**Author's Note:**

> Title taken from George Herbert's 'The Windows'.

_Frost-locked all the winter,_

_Seeds, and roots, and stones of fruits,_

_What shall make their sap ascend_

_That they may put forth shoots?_

 

 _-Spring_ _,_ Christina Rossetti

 

Delphine slid smoothly into the car, taking a seat closer to the door than was her usual custom. Although a few hours had passed since seeing Cosima, she still felt somehow on edge meeting Aldous in these new circumstances. She knew the kiss shouldn’t have bothered her as much as it did, shouldn’t have changed her relationship to her mentor who she was sure would not be in the least perturbed by the news, perhaps, indeed, might welcome it.

And yet...she felt all wrong, climbing into his car like this, outside the very steps she’d walked up with her subject just days before. Guilt tugged the cavity beneath her sternum as she struggled to present a nonchalance she had certainly never felt in her position at Dyad, but thought preferable to appearing flustered. More than was her habit, she inwardly retreated from this performance she faced Aldous with today. The dynamic between them had been tangibly shifted by Cosima’s impulsive act - she felt it the moment she opened the door.

If he also noticed, however, he gave no sign of having done so, barely looking up from his papers. Delphine found that today the man’s dismissive attitude simply amused and exasperated her rather than wounded her pride, as it had been wont to do.

“Where are you with Cosima?”

Delphine smirked and raised her eyebrows, not knowing how to respond. Despite the fact she had spent the last few hours turning over in her mind exactly this meeting and what she would say, she remained unsure. It was just moments but they were dangerous. What she divulged to Aldous was somehow deeply personal now. It was not only Cosima she was exposing but herself. Which was ridiculous - all the woman had done is kissed her, _l'amour de Dieu_. Still. It was unfamiliar territory and that put her a little on the defensive. “She --”. Delphine paused, imperceptibly weighing up for less than a second finally whether to impart to Aldous what felt so peculiarly private. “She made a pass at me, Aldous”. The disbelief in her own tone was evident and she inwardly flinched. She did not like to give Aldous any indication that she had been at all affected by Cosima’s apparent interest in her. His condescendingly insightful gaze would insinuate far more than she was prepared to consider at this moment.

Now his interest was evidently piqued. Enough to raise his attention from his work to her.

“Really”

She gave another soft laugh, hollow this time “Yes”.

As her senior’s hands ran through her hair, stroking her cheek in what he apparently considered to be a placatory manner, Delphine found that, for the first time, his touch repulsed her. That was too strong a word for what she felt in those exact seconds perhaps, although the more she reflected on their conversation later that evening, the stronger such a sentiment towards him grew in her. But even there, as his too-cold fingers tangled with her curls and his too-dry forehead pressed to her own, she felt, to her surprise, viscerally unsettled. His touch, his smooth, deceiving words _Cosima’s safety is at stake. Other subjects’ too. I need to know which ones she’s in contact with_ \- everything irked her. For all the many faults of Aldous Leekie, she had essentially liked him. Charismatic, clever, sharp. She had known he was old, a liar - perhaps even pathetic in some of his delusions - but she had nonetheless respected him enough to fuck him, admired him enough to be drawn to him despite his detractions. Even watching him at that lecture with Cosima she had still found herself, a little reluctantly, feeling an affectionate warmth towards this incorrigible performer.

Yet in this car, all was gone. Suddenly she realised his age - older than her father, she saw, with a sickening twist in her stomach. He was pompous, manipulative. His grip on her head made her want to break free and escape into the ice-purging air.

And for one second, inexplicably, she thought of that kiss. The warmth of Cosima’s lips and fingers, the desire dilating her pupils almost to the edges of her irises as she met Delphine’s eyes with a gaze more steady, more sure than Delphine had ever known. The unidentified wrenching sensation in her stomach as with sudden certainty she knew that Cosima desired her.

Delphine flexed her fingers, shaking the memory off. It was pubescent to be so consumed by these things.

“But _she_ has to initiate disclosure”.

Finally Aldous let go and returned to his side of the vehicle. “I’m not saying ‘disclose’. This is a direct threat, so I need you to dig deeper and faster”.

He opened the door and Delphine paused, just for a moment, somehow feeling with a (hitherto undiscovered) gut-intuition, that this was the last time he would touch her. He returned to his work, unconcerned, and so, with a final scales-fallen-from-her-eyes sweep of his face, she stepped out of the car, relief flooding through her lungs with every burning breath of the harsh Canadian air. She tasted a promised freedom that she did not know she had craved.

The car pulled away.

 

¬!”£$%^&*()_+¬!”£$%^&*()_+¬!”£$%^&*()_+¬!”£$%^&*()_+¬!”£$%^&*()_+¬!”£$%^&*

  
Perching on the kitchen counter-top, Delphine leaned back on the window-frame, carefully blowing the smoke from her cigarette out of her apartment window. She watched as the dusty tendrils dissipated into the slight mist hanging low over the city. The orange embers at the tip glowed in the dull light.

_I need you to dig deeper and faster._

She lifted her fingers to touch her lips and inhaled again, once more turning the words over in her mind. She disliked the way Americans treated sexual negotiation. It was euphemistic, brash and tawdry all at once. Despite the thrill of being seduced by Aldous initially, with his dire French and charm, she found she tired of their liaisons, feeling increasingly distant until she was almost consciously playing a role - prostituting herself to the man.

The taste of nicotine grew stale and bitter in her mouth at the thought and she took another drag to expunge it.

 _Merde,_ she was so young still. That perhaps was the revelation in Cosima that was unsettling all of the crystalline sterilities of mind and practice that Dyad had been forming in her soul - if she should properly call it that. She was still just in her twenties. Barely any older than Cosima, and yet somehow the playfulness and spontaneity of the younger woman felt as unfamiliar now as the frigidity of employment at Dyad had just two short years before.

Stubbing out the ashed cigarette-end, she hopped down, feeling a pleasing lightness in her dancer’s legs that she had forgotten.

With her new clarity of sight, her discomfort in this apartment with its cool marbles and gleaming steels was growing. It had felt like a metallic punch to the abdomen the first time she’d returned “home” having seen Cosima’s place for the first time. The contrast between the _confort_ of her cushioned boudoir and Delphine’s own monochrome show-home made her ache.

In fact, pretty much everything about Cosima was re-sensitising Delphine to all that was cold in her life. She found herself frequently reminded of Plato’s _La Grotte_ \- every time she left Cosima to re-enter a soul-less Dyad property she felt like the prisoner returning to the shadow-realm with the memory of the sun. And yet, like the prisoner, the cave had not always been her home. She had been warmer, easier, more _alive_ before Dyad. Everything Cosima was teasing out of her was familiar, merely estranged.

And _more_ , of course. A wry twist of her lips as she flicked the switch of the kettle on. Cosima must surely have a greater capacity for sensation and living than anyone she had ever met. And she had awakened an answering hunger in Delphine. Or was it re-awakened? She was finding it hard to tell, truthfully. Cosima was pulling at all parts of her - it was difficult to see what was hers and what had only been roused by the presence of this very particular external stimulus.  She knew she had always had a passionate curiosity - for science and sensation - but Cosima had something greater. Something intuitive. There was an emotional element in her openness to the world that was entirely new to Delphine. And it made her want that too. To experience the world from that perspective that made Cosima see the beauty in finding herself a clone. Delphine guessed she must have had an identity crisis about it too, somewhere along the discovery, but now she was claiming her identity for her own: exploring the webbing of her own matter in the language she called home - science.

She thought of Cosima taking her hand, pulling Delphine to her, with her, as she ran - away from Neolution and synthetics, into the winter sun. There was something both child-like and yet immistakeably womanly in Cosima’s sense of person and freedom that was irresistible. Delphine had rarely felt the _autonomie_ that the clone clearly did. It was disconcerting - drawing her to the woman in spite of herself, even as the same quality made Delphine wary. Made her feel that Cosima was dangerous, in some as yet undefined way.

Pouring a strong black tea, Delphine sighed as Aldous’ words returned once more to the foreground of her mind.

_I need you to dig deeper and faster._

Frustrated, she pinched the bridge of her nose and leaned back on the edge of the counter, cupping the scalding mug in the other hand.  

Americans, seemingly, did not understand the complexity of sex - always treating it either as if it were of the utmost import, binding two people together for life, or else seeing it as little more than “scratching an itch”, as she had heard it termed. But very rarely was it possible to have the cleanness either of total union or total disaffectation. Intimacy was complex. And all the more so here. To sleep with Cosima now, after their last interaction - she skipped determinedly over the memories of lips and fingertips grazing skin - would be anything but simple.

She puffed in exasperation, trying to release the tension from the muscles of her face.

Suppose it _was_ the way to get Cosima’s trust, win her confidence faster? Looking at it analytically, it could help save Cosima’s life.

And yet, Delphine somehow feared with an enormity approaching dread, unsure as she was as to why that should be, that Cosima would consider it an absolute betrayal. For Delphine to take by lies and on the orders of “Leekie” what the woman had offered so gently just hours before. Delphine couldn’t help but feel that for Cosima, for a clone, a subject, such a bodily violation might feel worst of all. She would not do it. She had only (in the face of Cosima’s shockingly disarming _Cosima-ness_ ) managed to rationalise the monitorship she had first assumed with so few misgivings even _this_ far by telling herself that it actively worked in Cosima’s interests.

But this. This would be relationally exploitative. Somehow ethics which had all seemed formalities to her when studying the digitally encrypted DNA of 324B21 were critical faced with this woman. Every decision she made in relation to her subject seemed to take more and more weight. She had unconsciously, foolishly, assumed it would be simple maintaining detachment from a clone. It was simple enough with everyone else. Indeed, it was so simple that she had not even considered a contingency where a personal attachment to her given subject might cause conflict.

And yet here she found herself, with far more qualms about sexually exploiting this supposed lab specimen than she would have for any fellow Dyad employee, she was sure. No, ambitious as she was, and cold as Dyad may have been making her, she would not prostitute her relationship with Cosima as she had with Aldous.

Feeling a weight lift off her lungs at the decision, Delphine took her first tentative sips of tea. Finding it cool enough, she transferred her weight back onto the flats of her feet and padded into the lounge area.

She placed the mug carefully on a coaster and dropped lightly onto the couch, stretching out her legs in front of her to curl her neatly painted toes over the edge of the glass coffee-table. The black tv screen on the wall reflected her own image back to her as she moved one arm back to rest her head on, allowing herself to re-member her last conversation with Cosima for the nth time.

_Don’t you think it’s time that we admit what this is really about?_

She determined not to notice the goose-bumps that lightly arose across her forearms as she thought of the words.

It wasn’t that she felt remotely uncomfortable about _homosexualitie,_ nor even that she hadn’t known Cosima’s sexual preferences - she’d read the case file including a full sexual history. It was that, somehow, despite everything the girl made her feel, the possibility of a romantic relationship had genuinely not occurred to her. She had assumed her heterosexuality so unquestioningly that the thought had never even formulated - still hadn’t even as Cosima’s lips met her own.

It had been a moment of total confusion. Sensorily, _everything_ awoke that she did not expect. She felt the flush of her blood, the uncharacteristic swooping in her stomach, the unbearably sensitive touch of her skin suddenly -

And all wrong. She had not considered that her body might respond so to the decidedly feminine Cosima. Nor that the draw she had felt to her from the start might be _this_ \- a total scientific and ethical apocalypse.

Of all that Cosima had awakened and re-awakened in her, this felt most beyond all her former experience and control.

But why should she have been so thrown? She’d always believed eroticism to be complex, manifesting in various ways and to varying degrees in most significant relationships of every kind. Should it be surprising to her that the immediate and compulsive draw she had felt toward the woman - to know and be known by her - had a sexual element?

Perhaps not. But then, perhaps it was not the type of attraction that was the problem, but rather the strength of it. She’d always had a comfortable relationship with her sexuality. She knew what she liked, knew how to get it, knew how to weaponise it, when the occasion called. This however was something unknown to her. Was it the surprise of it that had bewildered her? Left her not knowing what to say, how to move, what she wanted? Or did it mean...something?

But how could she know what it meant? She had no previous romantic nor sexual experience with women at all. Should she take these disconcerting sensations simply as an effect of their intellectual chemistry? Or was this physical _frisson_ in fact at the centre of what they had - the magnetic component pulling them towards all their other compatibilities?

And with that last word Delphine knew she had inadvertently considered Cosima as a potential romantic partner.

Such a realisation was of little use, however, simply propelling another round of the same questions - perhaps with slightly increased urgency this time.

_I need you to dig deeper and faster._

This was stupid. She was fixating on nothing. So she felt an attraction to Cosima. She felt attraction to many people, it did not have to mean anything significant. The fleeting thought arose that her total disorientation from a mere kiss and the sense she had of the terrain shifting underneath her feet probably belied this lie she was telling herself, but she chose to trust it anyway.

What _did_ mean something, certain and knowable, was her job. It was her duty as a monitor to protect the subject from this threat. It was her passion as a scientist to observe the subject at close hand. It was her hunger to be near Cosima.

If anything this new investment in her subject, whatever it meant, should simply inspire her work with increased vigour. There was no need for it to be a distraction when all it did was drive her deeper into what she was supposed to be doing anyway - exploring Cosima. She could direct... _this_.

With renewed confidence and a certainty she suspected to be false when moments later she found herself indecisively hovering over her wardrobe, she committed to returning to Cosima. She would engage on the science front, a mutual safe territory for them to meet on. And this, surely, was “what it was really about” - a fervour for knowledge, a thirst to innovate, re-work, create. Was this not after all what intrigued her in Cosima anyway? Sharing the true passion of her life with someone?

Her confidence in the power of science lasted all the way to the point Cosima opened the door and began apologising with an uncharacteristically nervous energy.

It continued as Cosima took her coat from her and they shifted into this supposed neutral territory of academics.

It lasted seconds longer as they thrust Dyad papers at one another with a little too much enthusiasm.

It crumbled as she looked at the papers before her and realised despite all her quite genuine excitement about this work she hoped to pour her life into, she still could not shake the way her body was surging with impulses and responses she had never felt before, all tugging her closer to this woman. Her investment in Cosima should have made this assignment easier. But somehow Dyad, Leekie, even immunology seemed very far from her grasp in this moment. All she could think, all she could feel, behind her eyelids and underneath her fingertips, was Cosima kissing her.

She was not used to speaking without careful consideration, seeking to frame her words so only the exact implications that she intended could be construed by her listener. Even more so when speaking in English, where the feeling of being a little less in control of the language’s connotations led her to apply an almost surgical precision to stitching together her sentences. And yet suddenly these words, horrifyingly ambiguous, throwing dynamite to the shaky foundations for a platonic relationship that they had only minutes before laid, tumbled from her lips and into the room, falling into the insinuating silence as the final vestiges of that safe monolith “science” disintegrated around them.

“I can’t stop thinking about that kiss”.

 


End file.
